Monday, October 26, 1981

Grunge

I read The Dharma Bums much of the morning which I'm really enjoying. Kerouac’s style, the way he conjours images into the mind, is just fantastic. Mum and Dad went on a tour of the two Nannas and while they were out Grant rang, talking about Junkie by William Burroughs and a Velvet Underground LP he's just got. I’m going across tomorrow. It felt good to talk to him.

At five Robert rolled up for the football and we set off for Walshey. The weather was miserable, gloomy, and wet and Robert was soon cursing and swearing and getting frighteningly intense as we made a wrong turn and headed fifteen miles into Whincliffe. We hurtled back through orange streets into Walshey itself, stopping, making frantic U-turns, asking passers-by for directions to the ground, which we reached with minutes to spare. The Athletic contingent was already queuing, shepherded by several policemen. Facilities for visiting fans were terrible. The rain streamed down as all the Easterby supporters were herded into the Newton End Stand.

Athletic looked terrible, ragged, and slow, Walshey going ahead easily after twenty two minutes and it felt like another drubbing was in store, but Easterby kept battling and Walshey looked as weak in defence as we did. Still, we were jubilant when Newlands equalised.

The second half was amazing, Easterby on the attack, nail-biting end-to-end soccer until we started to dominate, then attack after attack thrown forward, the Walshey ‘keeper Trevor George having to make several superb saves. Sure enough, five minutes from time McArdle blasted the ball home amid falling players. I couldn’t believe that they'd actually done it!! The last five minutes was unbearable. Robert and I walked to the car in amazement.

On the way back to Easterby we got completely lost again in the vast grunge of urban Walshey/Heathdale/Debdenshaw, vainly searching for the motorway but ending up on the road to Hydebridge instead. Robert seethed with frustration once more, swearing and cursing and I felt terrible he was having to drive all the way back and so I told him to take me to Dearnelow to save time and trouble. We dropped down over the moors on a tiny B-road in thick, patchy fog, getting back just before midnight. Carol made us both a big supper.

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ABOUT MERE PSEUD . . .

"It's about time you started thinking about the black dog on your back."

Mere Pseud emerges from the stain of a particular place at a particular time—England in the early 1980s, dreaming its way through the era of the Miner’s Strike, CND, Rock Against Racism, of Thatcher, the Falkland’s War and mass unemployment, an era that marks a turning point for British society, the advent of what we might call neoliberalism.

This four year long autofiction project mixes diary entries, cultural observation, teen confessionals, an enduring love for UK postpunk band The Fall, image-meditations on memory, and spoken word fragments; it’s a reckoning with the passages of time and the spectral intermingling of futures and pasts, a slantways slide through places, spaces, and states of mind.

This is the moveable backdrop; part social history, part prolonged personal pratfall, the spectral trace of a world that's already curiously antique.

"The journal has such familiar episodes . . . being a certain age at a certain time in history, the political atmosphere, cultural touchstones, living situations . . . desires to both escape and belong ending in nihilistic abyss of fuckitall."

PRINCIPAL DRAMATIS PERSONAE, SUMMER 1983

The Mere Pseud . . . The unreliable eighteen-year old modernist narrator of this fable. Now a student at Watermouth University. Perhaps he'll run into Howard Kirk?Barry, Stu, Pete, Penny, Gareth, Shelley, Lindsey. University friends.

Rowan Morrison. Dark-eyed changeling who lived a few doors down from the Mere Pseud his first year at Wollstonecraft. A little older and a little weirder than all the rest. Her dark sun sends a chill through the second floor corridors of Wollstonecraft.

Helen Vaughan . . . (1864-1919). Enigmatic Yorkshire novelist, author of The Harp of the Sky (1920), and inspiration for British horror writer Arthur Machen's character of the same name in his story "The Great God Pan." Occasional object of the Mere Pseud's obsessive thoughts about death, time, and the passing of all things.

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